Naomi
Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics
and Astronomy, and founding director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at
Rice University. She is the Director of the Smalley-Curl Institute.

She
was a graduate research fellow at IBM Research, Yorktown, NY, served as a
postdoctoral associate at AT&T Bell Laboratories and joined the Rice
faculty in 1990. Halas is one of the pioneering researchers in the field of
plasmonics, creating the concept of the “tunable plasmon” and inventing a
family of nanoparticles with resonances spanning the visible and infrared
regions of the spectrum. Halas pursues fundamental studies of coupled plasmonic
systems as well as applications of plasmonics in biomedicine, optoelectronics, chemical
sensing, photocatalysis, and most recently in solar energy and sustainability, with ‘solar
steam’ technology. She is author of more than 300 refereed
publications, has more than fifteen issued patents, has presented more than 500
invited talks, and has been cited more than 40,000 times (H=107 on Web of
Science, over 65,000 citations and H=121 on Google Scholar). She is co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, a Houston-based
company developing photothermal therapies for cancer and other diseases based
on her nanoparticles, currently in multiple clinical trials, and is currently transferring other technologies from her laboratory. Halas is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National
Academy of Engineering in 2014, and
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a
recipient of the American Physical Society Frank Isakson Prize for Optical
Effects in Solids, the Willis E. Lamb Award, and the Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America. She is a Fellow of OSA, APS,
SPIE, IEEE, MRS, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Inventors. She has been a National Security Science
and Engineering Faculty Fellow of the U.S. Department of Defense and an advisor to
the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the National Science
Foundation.
She
is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Photonics, Materials Horizons, Chemical Physics Letters and Laser
and Photonics Reviews, and an Associate Editor of Nano Letters.